Mandalay – the U Bein pedestrian bridge

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Ginger

Spanning a length of 1.2 kilometers (almost a mile) across the shallow Taungthaman Lake, the U Bein bridge has the distinction of being the world’s longest bridge built entirely of teak. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century, and most of its roughly one thousand teak posts are the original ones, all that is left of the wood from a former royal palace nearby. The bridge is surprisingly heavily used, and not just by tourists.

It’s a good thing they were thoughtful enough to provide those benches. They’re a good place for a person to rest while waiting for their lagging, picture-taking wife.

The surrounding lake is also interesting, providing places for worship, fishing, and, er, other lakeside activities.

Mandalay – Motorbike City

Posted on August 14, 2011 by Ginger

Welcome to Mandalay, the motorbike city! They’re everywhere! Thousands of them! And the lanes drawn on the road (even the direction the traffic is supposed to go) mean *nothing* to them! And the speed limits… Oh. What speed limits?

I have never been anywhere where I have been more terrified to cross the street than in Mandalay.

It turns out that with sufficient ingenuity you can carry almost anything on a motorbike. (Later, in Phnom Penh, it wasn’t uncommon to see four, five, or even (rarely) six people astride a single motorbike.)

And here’s another good thing about motorbikes: They’re really easy to park in a small space.

Bicycles, it turns out, are easy to park, too.

Why the parking areas seem to be segregated by bike type, I can’t say. But they are.

Atop Mandalay Hill, where the tourists go for the view in all directions, and the natives go to practice English by speaking with the tourists, I met a young man who was studying engineering at the university. From the hilltop, he showed me the building that housed his university. It seemed pretty far away, and so I asked whether, after the demonstrations a few years ago the government had moved this university out of the downtown part of the city, as they had in Yangon. He said that yes, they had. And he now had to commute fifty minutes each way entirely across Mandalay on his motorbike every day to get between his home and the university, compared to fifteen minutes before. Just keeping the city safe from troublesome students while adding to the traffic problem, the need for gasoline (which is in short supply, and expensive), and global pollution.

Bagan – Sunset from Shwesandaw Stupa

Posted on August 13, 2011 by Ginger

At last, dear friends, after a week of posts about Bagan, we arrive at the evening of the journey’s second day here. I have completely omitted the eight (8) stupas and temples that we either visited or stopped to contemplate during the day, along with their corresponding Buddhas of white and gold. It feels like time to move on. Besides, we can see many of these religious structures from the top of Shwesandaw Stupa. Let’s go look.

There actually was a bit of a sunset…

Finally, as we leave Bagan for Mandalay, I give you two complete panoramic views, each comprising about half of the view from the top of the stupa. If you right-click on each image and download it, you should be able to see the panorama in a larger size.

Tomorrow–it’s on to Mandalay!

Bagan – Min Nan Thu Village

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Ginger

The people of Min Nan Thu village work hard to support themselves, including allowing the occasional tourist like us to visit, with one young woman serving as our guide.

The buildings are modest in the traditional way of the Myanmar countryside.

But the people are open and friendly. (For the thousandth time, I wish I could speak Burmese.)

This old woman rolls a kind of cigar to sell in the market. Here, she pauses in her work to enjoy one of her products and to entertain us. She is holding the tin can under her lighted cigar so that she doesn’t inadvertently burn down her house with a stray spark. A relative (or neighbor) comes to visit and perhaps also show us a courteous welcome.

Here is what the cigar-lady’s house looks like on the inside.

The family sleeps upstairs. There is a television, but no electricity. They watch TV maybe two hours a week, running it on a battery.

The girl below is making woven bamboo picture frames, which she will sell to tourists.

This is the inside of her house:

Below are some views of the village’s general store, which is also the shopkeeper’s house. It is the most substantial house by far of any we saw in the village.

The next three pictures show the work area of the village blacksmith and wheelwright. He was not actually working there. Then again, it was daylight and growing season on the farm. We saw no men in the village. Perhaps, except for emergencies, tasks like blacksmithing wait for a less intense time out in the fields.

These children came to see the tourists.

The baby made me feel sad: In the USA there would have been the means to operate on his cleft lip. Here, probably not. But the baby was clearly loved by village women and children alike. In the USA, would all the neighbors have been so caring?

Here is an outdoor living area of a house. The platform is the type that is used indoors and out for sitting, entertaining, working, and sleeping.

More work areas: a heavy-duty foot-operated mortar and pestle and a grain mill. Spinning thread (working on a platform outdoors, like the one in the earlier photograph). A cattle shed.

Everything in Bagan is near a stupa. Min Nan Thu village is no exception.

Bagan – the lacquerware factory

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Ginger

We visited a factory that made very fine lacquerware. Each piece required seventeen steps taking a period of months (so that each layer of lacquer could completely dry before adding the next layer). The base plate, bowl, vase, tray, or mug is made of bamboo and very lightweight. Layer after layer of lacquer is applied before even the first step of the design is begun. It is in the number and depth of these layers that the finely made pieces can be differentiated from the cheap souvenirs (which are still lovely but are not strong and may easily chip).

At the entrance of the factory, three young women hand-etched designs of exquisite detail into lacquerware pieces. Each color of the design is etched and lacquered as a separate layer.

Here is a close-up of the piece this woman is working on, showing the exquisite level of detail of her etching. She needs good eyesight for this!

To the right of these young women sit three men who are the “big picture” artists. These men lay out the overall configuration of the design on each piece of lacquerware. The women then fill in the ornate details. The “big picture” men are specialists. One lays out abstract patterns (such as the vase pictured above); the second does animals; and the third lays out historical scenes.

In the background, another man is perhaps putting an early layer of lacquer onto a giant vase.

Nearby, three men process each piece that the young women have etched. Here, one man applies a layer of paint (in this case, green), while a second man wipes it off. The paint comes off everywhere except in the newly etched lines, where it belongs. The third man polishes each layer of lacquer using petrified wood.

Finally, all the layers of lacquer have been applied. Many pieces are inlaid now with mother-of-pearl. And young women smooth and polish the face of the piece one last time before it is ready for sale.

Bagan – Seen (scene) along the road

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Ginger

You can’t drive anywhere in Bagan without passing temples and stupas. Many of these have names; maybe they all do. But many are just mysterious, ancient, and beautiful structures we just passed by on the way to somewhere else. Hey, it would take a year or more to visit them all!

The next two photos are of Hti-lo Minlo Temple, a place we possibly would have visited, had I not inadvertently forgotten to collect my shoes from the previous temple in my haste to escape a crowd of vendors who were desperate to make a living in this off-season for tourists and knew a sucker when they saw one (I’d foolishly bought something from one of them).

Yes, I did manage to retrieve the sandals! 😉

Below are some other temples and stupas, whose names I don’t know. But they sure are pretty…

Possibly, one or two of these might be other views of Htilo-Minlo from other angles on the road, I’m not sure. But I hope that all of these photos will show you something of the beauty and grace of the Bagan landscape.

Bagan – the soybean paste factory

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Ginger

Our first factory! This family-run business makes (we were assured) the very best soybean paste in all of Myanmar.

First, we must have access to the needed raw ingredients. In this case, primarily soybeans and water.

And tools! Of course there must be tools.

The men pour the soybeans into a chute that empties into a vat, where they add water (and maybe other stuff?), boil it over a hot fire, and stir until the mix is thickened. The mix is then poured into the next vat and the next; more water is added; and eventually a thick paste is obtained. I am assured that this is truly delicious stuff.

Now that we have brewed up a vat-full of delicious soybean paste, it goes to the next area of the factory for packaging. This is women’s work.

At the edge of this work area is the home of the factory owner. We ask if we may look inside, and permission is granted.

Bagan – the traditional way of life

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Ginger

Along the road from Shwezigon Pagoda to the soya bean paste factory (to be posted tomorrow), we passed through a small village. Some of the roofs may be better constructed than centuries ago, and there’s the occasional satellite dish. A well-constructed little dry-goods store has proprietor’s quarters above. But really, little has changed here in all this time. The houses and many fences are still made of woven bamboo, and many of the roofs are thatch. The road is still dirt. Vehicles–what few there are–share the road with children and animals.

It’s not so different here from one generation to the next.

Many of the homes and stores in southeast Asia have little “spirit houses” in which the spirit of the place may dwell without invading the human habitation. In the cities, these are often made of concrete. Here in the village, though, the spirits live much like the humans do.

Now here’s that lovely dry-goods store, built (it proclaims in both Burmese and Anglo numerals) in 1983. These people are doing relatively very well indeed.

Here are some people who are, perhaps, not doing so well, but still, they have a boat. And waste not, want not. Empty provision sacks, sewn together, make fine sails for traveling along the wide Irrawady River.

Bagan – the hotel and the travesty

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Ginger

This is a serious post, and it’s not all about the beauty of Myanmar (of which there is much to be said). It’s about something gone horribly, heart-achingly wrong. The picture says it all:

This modern “viewing tower,” out of all proportion to the harmonious landscape around it, was built as a part of the hotel we stayed at. I blush to admit we had anything to do with it. This structure is such a monstrous parody of its surroundings that if buildings could be evil, this just might qualify.

To put this in perspective: The plains of Bagan are punctuated with thousands of ruins of millenium-old temples and stupas whose delicate spires reach skyward, bestowing a rhythm and grace on the landscape. At ground level, this viewing tower, built in brick, mirrors some of the traditional forms. But rising from its center is not a graceful bell-shaped dome ending in a spire, but rather a thick, phallic metal cylinder ending in a tourist restaurant and an observation deck (US $10 entry fee).

Welcome to the Aureum Palace Resort Hotel, built by a rich Burmese entrepreneur reputed to be close to the country’s powerful ruling regime. The fact that permission was ever granted to build this monstrosity suggests strongly that such rumors could be true.

As for the Aureum Palace Resort Hotel itself–we couldn’t wait to get out of there. Despite the manifest luxury and the friendly, young staff, nothing seemed to work–either physically or systematically.

Here are the good points:

Very friendly staff, as mentioned above
Beautiful design (not counting the abomination at the entrance)
Open, breezy lobby
Large, attractive rooms

On the down side:

The first room we were given smelled of sewage
There was no water pressure, so water only trickled out of the shower
When we asked to change rooms, we were promised a new room when we returned in a couple of hours. But the new room was not forthcoming.
When we insisted on a new room, the new room in the same building also smelled of sewage and had the wrong type of bed. (This hotel was nearly empty, so there was no shortage of rooms.)
When we insisted on another new room, it took some time to “make one ready.” (Have I mentioned that the hotel was nearly empty?)
This new room was close to the hotel’s generator, and so was quite loud when the window was open and the generator on. But it was in a different building and did not smell like sewage. We accepted it.
The generator came on whenever the electricity failed, which was often. This was not the hotel’s fault; blackouts are normal in this part of the country, where there’s not enough electricity to go around. However, the air conditioning was not hooked up to the generator circuit, so there was no air conditioning when the generator was on. And it was loud when we opened the window (see above). And–get this–the air conditioning did not come back on when electricity was restored!
The bathroom door wouldn’t stay shut
The shower was stuck on the lower shower head, and the switch to the upper shower head didn’t work
The water ran hot and cold intermittently
They neglected to give us our wake-up call
While we sat in the lobby, a man began polishing the marble floor near us, using a loud machine. He polished and repolished the same square of marble for over an hour.
The driveway (which we had to walk across to get to the lobby) was paved in a stone so rough it was unpleasant both for walking and for driving. Not exactly a warm welcome.
And, by the way, this was the only hotel we stayed at in Myanmar that maintained a police presence much of the time. Hmm…

Well, Ive finished my diatribe now. This was the only ugly spot on our whole trip. Next post, on to the beautiful and interesting places again!

Bagan – Overview (Tayoke Pye Temple)

Posted on August 6, 2011 by Ginger

So it occurs to me that here I’ve been prattling on about Bagan, and outside of the fact that you’ve figured out from these posts that Bagan is in Myanmar (Burma), many of you probably never heard of the place.

Let me just say that as a potential World Heritage Site (which it might have been, had there not been certain, er, mismanagement along the way that resulted in a few horrendous structures that were allowed to be built and renovations that were more or less botched. More about that later.) this is right up there with Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu. Second to none. Mindblowing.

Bagan is a plain of about sixteen square miles located along the Irrawaddy River somewhat south of Mandalay. On this plain, over four thousand religious structures (stupas and temples) have been identified, all built between the 11th and 13th centuries AD, when Bagan was the center of a great empire. These structures, mostly still evident, are now in various states of preservation, reconstruction, and ruin. Of the palaces, mansions, farmhouses, cities, villages, markets, shops, and factories that must once have existed side by side with these religious structures, nothing remains. They would have been built of wood. Which burns.

Close to sunset of our first day in Bagan, we climbed to the second level of the Tayoke Pye Pagoda (one of the few that are considered safe to climb) to watch the sunset. Considering that it was monsoon season, the sunset wasn’t bad, with late afternoon golden light settling over the plain. We had the temple to ourselves.

The ruins of Tayoke Pye Pagoda show something of the character of the historic structures.

Notice the plants growing out of the stonework and masonry. This kind of structure and decay is typical of most of the temples in the region (which have much of value that could and should be preserved).

And as these views from the temple’s second level show, this one is surrounded by hundred (thousands, actually) of others, many of them just as amazing. Sixteen square miles of them, set into the most idyllic countryside imaginable.